euta, at the start of the 8th century. On the African shore of the strait, a Christian stronghold was still holding out, though Carthage had fallen and the Arab armies were nearing Tangier. Its master would go down in history as Count Julian, Ilyan or Yulyan in the Arabic sources. His life fits in a few lines of chronicle, his legend in whole volumes. The task is to tell one from the other.
It is often said that the Berbers submitted to the armies from the East without a fight. The sources say otherwise. In 682-683, Kusayla ibn Lamzam would ambush Uqba ibn Nafi at Tehouda, in the region of Biskra, where Uqba and his warriors would die. Then the Kahina, the “queen of the Aures,” would rule several Berber tribes from about 685 to 704 or 705, and would crush the army of Hassan ibn al-Numan, the conqueror of Carthage. Further west, the last act would play out around Ceuta.
Who was Count Julian?
The sources agree on neither his name nor his origin. The oldest surviving Arabic account to name him, by the Egyptian Ibn Abd al-Hakam in the 9th century, calls him a foreigner, “Lord of Septa,” who also governed a town called al-Khadra and acknowledged the authority of Roderic, king of the Visigoths at Toledo.
Historians have drawn three portraits from this. For Spanish chroniclers, until the 19th century, he was a Visigothic noble. For the Arabist Reinhart Dozy, and later Evariste Levi-Provencal, he was the last Byzantine governor of Septem, today’s Ceuta, which for a few years after the fall of Carthage in 698 remained the emperor’s last possession in Africa. For Francisco Codera, and later Ramon Menendez Pidal, he was a Christian Berber of the Ghomara tribe. Luis Garcia Moreno proposed to reconcile these readings: cut off by the Arab advance, the last military commander of Byzantine Ceuta would have placed himself under the king of Toledo.
The man himself very likely existed. His name recurs consistently in the Arabic sources, and descendants of his are known in Cordoba under the Umayyads.
From Musa to Tariq
In the early 8th century, Musa ibn Nusayr would subdue the country of Tangier, where bilingual copper coins, in Latin and Arabic, would be struck after the conquest of 709. According to the Akhbar Majmu’a, an 11th-century chronicle, Julian then made a pact of submission with Musa. Musa would appoint Tariq ibn Ziyad governor of Tangier.
Then comes the story that made Julian famous. Ibn Abd al-Hakam tells that Julian had sent one of his daughters to Roderic’s court to be educated, and that the king got her pregnant. “I see for him no other punishment or recompense, than that I should bring the Arabs against him,” the father is said to have declared. He would send his two daughters to Tariq as hostages, then provide the ships. The soldiers would cross in groups, hiding on the coast by day, while the people of al-Andalus took the vessels going back and forth for merchant ships.
A legend from Egypt
For historians, the story of the daughter is legend. It first appears in this 9th-century Egyptian author and is missing from Ibn Habib, the earliest surviving Andalusi writer. It would reach the Christian chronicles only in the early 12th century, in an anonymous Mozarabic work that calls the young woman Oliba and blames King Witiza, not Roderic. The name La Cava, which Spanish tradition would give her, simply means a prostitute in Arabic. For Gozalbes, the tale offered an appealing explanation for the civil war then dividing the Visigoths, when part of the nobility, led by Witiza’s sons, sought Arab help against Roderic.
Tariq would defeat Roderic in 711, and the king would die in the battle. Of Julian, almost nothing more is known. According to Ibn Khaldun, as cited by Gozalbes, the Arabs would settle in Ceuta peacefully after his death. His line would take root in Cordoba: a son, Balcayas, then a grandson who already bore an Arabic name, Abdallah.
- Ibn Abd al-Hakam, History of the Conquest of Spain, trans. John Harris Jones, Göttingen, 1858, pp. 18-22, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/conqspain.asp
- Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, “El Comes Iulianus (Conde Julián de Ceuta), entre la historia y la literatura,” Al Qantir, 11, 2011, pp. 3-35. https://www.condadodecastilla.es/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/el-comes-iulianus-conde-julian-ceuta-historia-literatura.pdf
- Abderrahmane Khelifa, “‛Oqba ibn Nâfi‛,” Encyclopédie berbère, 35, 2013, pp. 5788-5794. https://journals.openedition.org/encyclopedieberbere/2819
- Philippe Ouannès, “Al-Kahina,” Encyclopædia Universalis. https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/al-kahina/
